Anxiously, Lily trudged through the hay-strewn sand in the moonlight, hearing the grunts and lows of the animals as they settled down in their cages for the night. Madame Crimson lived in the nicest trailer, a fact that was the source of much rumor and speculation. Silver Steele had even whispered that the woman had hypnotized the circus owner into giving her special favors, like the best living quarters and the highest pay. Lily was thinking about this as she climbed the steps to knock on the door.
Madame Crimson stood in the threshold after answering Lily’s knock, not speaking. The purple robe she wore covered almost her entire body, and was made of very heavy material, like wool or velvet. Only the woman’s hands—ancient, bony, with nails like an eagle’s talons—were visible, their profusion of gold bracelets almost an ironic statement of defiant femininity. Lily couldn’t tell whether the woman was looking at her or not; she could discern no hint of a face behind the black fabric screen beneath the hood. Lily smiled, awkwardly. One of the woman’s hands hovered before her eyes, beckoning her inside.
Madame Crimson still had not spoken a single word, and Lily was too nervous to initiate any sort of conversation. She never did find out why the fortune teller had chosen her out of all the others at the circus; after that night, the reasons seemed less than pressing. Lily remembered that she had drunk a single glass of wine, but was not impaired in any way. The trailer was relatively well kept, but crammed with arcane-looking texts and smelling vaguely unpleasant. She remembered Madame sitting very still on a small sofa across from her, mostly appearing to stare from behind her opaque veil, her head tilted as though she was fascinated by Lily’s very presence. It was a long time before Lily finally realized Madame actually tried to hypnotize her; no sooner had this fact sunk in than she further realized that it seemed to be working. She remembered feeling unmoored, adrift; the sensation should have frightened her, but somehow it didn’t. Instead, she felt strangely peaceful, as though she had let go of herself and was simply at one with her surroundings, a cluster of molecules among billions of others. She could still see Madame, and she was still poised on the sofa across from her, but to her she no longer looked like the slightly witchy, small-time sideshow hypnotist that she was. Now, she seemed angelic, bathed in radiant light, her unseen face glowing with infinite love, grace, and wisdom. Lily laughed, a sound of pure joy erupting from her lips, for she had never seen or felt anything quite so wonderful.
When Madame got up from the sofa, she left trails of bright rainbow colors in her wake, and Lily watched, fascinated, as the woman approached, the light emanating from her body putting the sun’s light to shame, but somehow not too bright to look at directly. She came closer and closer until she was a supernova, blotting out all else in Lily’s vision. Then Lily felt fingers on the back of her neck, and all at once, the light exploded inside her brain, obliterating the life she’d known before, clearing the way for the new life, the new information that was to come. For a single moment, she felt as though she possessed all knowledge in the universe, and then, a second later, everything went dark.
When she woke the next day, she was still in Madame’s trailer, and the night before seemed like nothing more than a vivid dream. She felt fantastic, reborn, ready to take on the world. She sat up, her face stretched into a blissful smile that she couldn’t get rid of, even if she had felt any desire to. After glancing around the trailer and seeing no one, she thought immediately of Rose, and how wonderful it would be to share this experience with her. Surely Mother wouldn’t mind, for Mother was how she now thought of Madame. Perhaps she should ask before she did anything. She wasn’t afraid of Mother, not exactly, but she just thought that Mother would know what was best.
Lily found the woman sitting at the small kitchen table in the trailer, her spindly finger poised upon the pages of an open, yellowed book. She looked up as Lily approached, but said nothing.
“I feel better than I’ve ever felt in my life,” Lily said, unable to contain herself. She saw that Mother had not moved or reacted, but she decided to press on. With a deferential bow of the head, she asked permission to bring her sister Rose, in order to have her experience the awakening that she had experienced the night before.
Mother’s head tilted again, far to the right, and the nature of her silence changed. Lily’s stomach knotted, afraid the answer would be no, but then Mother simply nodded, and turned back to her book.
Elated, Lily tore across the sawdust-strewn ground to her own trailer, the one she shared with her infinitely more beautiful twin. Rose seemed skeptical at first, but finally relented, grudgingly, and followed Lily back to Mother.
That night transpired very similar to Lily’s night of conversion, but this time Lily could watch from the outside, and marvel at the power Mother radiated. At the last minute, before Mother touched Rose and completed her awakening, Lily was sent out of the room so that she could not witness the actual act of transformation. She resented this, but decided, as she lay on the bed in the tiny cramped bedroom, that it was probably for the best.
Rose had come in then, and the two girls seemed closer than ever, now privy to a shared secret that bound them tighter even than the ties of biology. They fell asleep in each other’s arms, which they hadn’t done since they were children.
When Lily awoke an undetermined amount of time later, she felt strange and dislocated. Rose still slept beside her, apparently without a care in the world. This time, Lily clearly remembered the events of the night before, and she knew immediately that she was still in Mother’s trailer. Something was different. When she sat up, she realized what it was; the trailer was moving.
Lily rolled out of bed and stood, with some difficulty, still very groggy and dizzy from sleep. The back of her head throbbed, which was odd as she hadn’t felt it the day before. The pain was coming from where Mother had touched her. Lily put her hand there, where her head sloped down into her neck, and she felt a slightly raised ridge of skin, like the lump of an old scar. She never remembered there being a scar there before. Disturbed, she crouched down and gently brushed Rose’s hair away from her neck. No, her sister bore no scar, but the skin was red there, in a parabola shape, as though something had irritated it. Lily now wished more than ever that she could have seen what Mother did to Rose and to her.
Crossing the small room—little more than a closet really—Lily peered out a tiny, dusty rectangle of window, and there she saw a ribbon of black asphalt unspooling under a naked desert sun. She had no idea where they were; the landscape was endlessly monotonous, one mile bleeding into the next. All that she did know was that the circus was behind her, perhaps forever. She found, to her surprise, that she did not miss it. So she sat there, by the window, staring out at the road behind, and waited for Rose to wake up, waited for their great adventure to begin.
It was only later that she met Father, who came on board the night of Rose’s conversion, after both girls were sleeping. He worked as the circus strongman for a brief period, entertaining audiences with his ability to bend metal bars with his bare hands, to pull brick-laden trucks along with his teeth. Now he simply followed Mother’s lead, driving the car that pulled the trailer, doing her speaking for her, carrying out her every wish. Both Lily and Rose, while timid in his presence, accepted him unreservedly as a paternal figure, and sought to please him as they sought to please Mother, their new master. Over the long months that followed, Lily’s fierce love for her new family only deepened, becoming a burning energy which sustained her during the journey set before her.
Now, she thought, finally back in the present, look how far I’ve come. The church had grown impressively, largely through her own efforts, and even though she failed to get into the house tonight like Mother and Father wanted her to, she had done very well in other aspects, and anyway, there was always tomorrow, and the day after that. The great adventure was still in many ways ahead of her, and she couldn’t wait to step forward and embrace i
t.
Chapter Fifteen
The library was part of a huge complex of squat white buildings across the street from the river, which smelled vaguely fishy, even from a distance. The complex also contained the county hall of records, a synergy that pleased Chloe very much. “We’ll kill two birds with one stone,” she said as she maneuvered her rattling car into the single remaining empty space. Olivia, in the passenger seat, nodded vaguely.
It was early afternoon, a Thursday. Although she had other things to do, the question of the history of the house she lived in nagged at Chloe since the discussion about the dreams two nights ago. She knew she wouldn’t be able to rest until she came up with some solid information. Olivia, on a rare day off, surprised her by wanting to come along. “No offense,” Chloe said, “but you haven’t exactly acted like you care that much about this.”
Olivia shrugged, no offense apparently taken. “I live in the house, too,” she said simply. “I want the dreams to stop as much as you do.”
That sounded good enough for Chloe. To be perfectly honest, Olivia looked as though she needed some resolution to this whole dilemma; dark circles under her eyes shone like bruises in the harsh sunlight, and her shoulders sagged forward as she walked. She talked about quitting her job because of her manager’s newly minted religious mania, and Chloe knew that could account for some of the stress, but not all of it.
The interior of the municipal building was almost chilly, and Chloe shoved her hands into the pockets of her black sweater. A guard in a navy uniform pointed the girls toward the records offices, and they both thanked him, heading down the deserted and echoing hallway.
A young man with silver-rimmed glasses looked up as they entered. “Help you?”
Chloe stepped forward. “I hope so. I’m looking for any information you might have about the house at 715 Castillo. Permits, blueprints, deeds, whatever. I’m not really sure if I’ve come to the right place or not,” she admitted.
The man smiled. “Well, let’s see if you have.” He turned and disappeared through a partially concealed door a few feet behind his desk. Chloe heard papers rustling from back there, and the man mumbling to himself. It seemed as though an impossibly long amount of time passed before he emerged again, his arms laden with papers. “Found a few things,” he said cheerily. “If you’d like, we could have a seat over here, have a look at them.” He gestured with his head toward a long table at the back of the office, which Chloe hadn’t noticed. The man’s tone grew apologetic. “We used to let people check this stuff out, but we lost a lot of records that way, so we had to stop. I can make copies of anything you need.”
“Thanks.” Chloe and Olivia followed the man to the table and parked themselves in two of the wooden chairs. The man laid his finds upon the table in front of them.
“You working on a project or something?” he asked as Chloe began flipping through the folders.
She didn’t see any reason why she shouldn’t tell him at least part of the truth. “Actually, we bought this house not too long ago. We were just interested in its history.”
“Ah!” The man’s eyes lit up behind his glasses. “Well, from what I’ve heard, its history certainly is interesting.”
“What do you mean?” asked Olivia, looking up from a yellowing permit she’d been studying.
“We know about the magician and everything,” Chloe said, in order to cut to the chase faster. She wanted to get some information, but she didn’t have all day to listen to stuff she already knew.
“Well, yeah, that’s what I was going to say,” the man said, obviously taken aback by her brusqueness, but quick to recover his aplomb. “Did you know the guy disappeared? He lived in that house like a hermit for I don’t know how long, and after a while nobody saw him again. When people finally thought to go to the house looking for him, he had vanished. Poof.” The man made a little disappearance gesture with his hands.
“How do you know that?” Olivia asked.
“Oh, my grandfather used to tell stories about it,” he said. “He never knew the magician, mind you, but everybody in town at the time knew of him. He was involved in some sort of scandal; that’s why he retired to the house out there.”
“What kind of scandal?” said Chloe.
The man shrugged. “Who knows? My grandfather never told me that part.”
“Hm.” Chloe peered back down at the multitude of papers in front of her, which had been folded and refolded so many times that the creases were shiny. She recognized a few building permits, and some other financial documents that were signed by a flourishing hand. Abraham B. Crandall. Chloe shivered a little as she thought of the long-gone magician’s fingers sweeping across the page. She didn’t know why, but until now she always thought of Crandall as a figment of their collective imaginations, despite all the evidence of him left in the house. Seeing his signature in black and white made him uncomfortably real.
After a few more minutes, Chloe finished going through the pile and readied to head over to the library. The records here were fairly complete, but didn’t really tell her anything significant about the house or what was happening to them. She supposed if she were more superstitious, she could genuinely believe that Crandall had died in the house and was at this moment still haunting it, but despite all the odd occurrences, she found she just couldn’t take it that far. Not yet, anyway, she thought with a trace of bitterness.
She was gathering up her pile when Olivia suddenly said, “Hey, Clo, check this out.”
Chloe felt her heart flutter a little, and barely noticed that the records clerk was leaning close against her, straining for a better look. Olivia held a faded sheet of flimsy tracing paper in her hands, its corners flapping merrily underneath the air conditioning vents. Chloe peered at it, at first hardly able to make out what was written there, but finally seeing something emerging.
It was a blueprint, or at least a sketchy plan of the house, done in what looked like grease pencil. There were few architects’ marks, and Chloe wondered if these were the plans that Crandall himself had drawn up and filed. Even though Chloe was no expert at reading plans, she could easily make out the lines of the rooms, the tiny boxes where windows would go, the meticulously rendered porch with its brick half-circle design. At first, she couldn’t see why Olivia had called her attention to the paper at all, but then, all at once, she spotted it. “Holy shit,” she breathed.
“What is it?” The clerk was clearly puzzled, his eyes owlish behind his glasses.
“Oh, it’s…nothing, really.” Now that she had seen what was on the plans, she had the sudden urge to keep it from strangers, at least until they had figured out what the meaning of it was. “We had just wondered what the deal was with the bedroom closets, you know. They seem smaller compared to what’s drawn on here.”
The clerk clearly wasn’t buying it, but he also took the hint that it was none of his business. He straightened up, suddenly a servant of the county again. “Would you ladies like me to make a copy of that for you?” he asked.
“Yes, please,” said Olivia. “Thanks very much, you’ve been a big help.”
The man nodded and took the paper without another word, heading for the copy machine behind his desk.
Chloe and Olivia exchanged glances, but said nothing until the man had returned, handed them the copy, and gathered up the remaining papers in their folders. “Have a good day, then,” he said as they left, sounding a little flat.
Once they were outside, Chloe nearly exploded. “I can’t believe it! There’s supposed to be a room back there!”
“Yeah. I wonder why it was sealed up?” A boat blew its horn out on the river and Olivia turned her head toward it.
“I don’t know, but we have to tell the guys about this.” She pulled her cell phone out of her purse, opened it, then paused. “Know what? I’ll wait to tell Martin in person, tonight,
when Ivan’s home, too.” She put the phone away. “I guess the library can wait until another time.”
“Now they’re really going to want to bust that wall down,” Olivia said, her voice trembling with excitement and perhaps a trace of apprehensiveness.
“Well, I’m starting to feel that way myself,” Chloe said.
Chapter Sixteen
Martin couldn’t concentrate on his work and threw his paintbrush down in frustration.
Why did it suddenly seem that this house, which he had helped pick out, had worked to renovate, had loved and admired, was the source of so much misery? The dreams had reappeared these last two nights, as vivid as ever; if anything, they’d gotten even more insistent, as though they were becoming exasperated at his inability to act on their warnings. It wasn’t only him, he knew; the others still looked drawn and exhausted, and were often crabby and short of temper, particularly Ivan. If the house was trying to tell them something, then it was certainly being obnoxious about it.
Then there was the matter of their little quasi-break-in, of Ivan’s diminutive stalker. The girls dismissed the incident as nothing, but Martin hadn’t. He sensed Ivan hadn’t either, even though the two of them had barely spoken of it. There was something weird about that girl turning up, although he couldn’t have articulated what it was. For some reason, it made him think of that man and the pretty girl coming to the door that day, a few weeks before they’d opened, and seemingly wanting to come inside but unwilling—unable?—to. He still thought of that girl and the desperate, yet oddly flirtatious, look she’d given him. Why the thought of a deformed dwarf girl coming to the door should remind him of the beautiful one wasn’t apparent to him; he didn’t know if there was a connection there at all, but the similarities nagged at him.
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